"I don't think we try to be all things to all people,'' director Lieven Bertels said, ''but the width of the festival is certainly a challenge. We don't shy away from that because it has become a part of the festival's uniqueness.''

There were 121 sold-out performances. Gross box office takings were $7.3 million; in 2012 they were $6.1 million.

"The width of the festival is certainly a challenge" ... director Lieven Bertels. Photo: Steven Siewert

The Herald's critics were regulars among the total audience of more than 500,000. Here are their verdicts on the first of Bertels' three festival programs:

Theatre

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If the theatre program lacked an obvious international drawcard (Heiner Geobbels's Eraritjaritjaka was anything but obvious), exceptional home-grown productions made up for it in spades: Sydney Theatre Company's passionate and sincere The Secret River; Windmill's fantastically funny School Dance; and from Perth, the gentle exploration of life's twilight It's Dark Outside. I found The Rape of Lucrece and Rian gripping; Murder, Masi and Othello C'est Qui substantially less so. In short, a diverse, challenging and frequently moving festival. Now I need a lie down. Jason Blake

Sydney's arts scene is rich yet, like all cities, prone to repeating itself if not periodically refreshed. The Sydney Festival's role is to broaden the scope of imaginative possibilities. Heiner Goebbels's Eraritjaritjaka combined music, video and texts to make utterly brilliant theatre. Vivienne Westwood's punk designs brought edge and frisson to Handel in Semele Walk. La Fura dels Baus introduced sombre Orwellian realities to Verdi's A Masked Ball, while The Peony Pavilion overlaid timeless metaphors with the strangeness of an ancient tradition. Peter McCallum

If classical (or non-pop, or traditional, or ''art'', or whatever) music is your thing, the 2013 festival was a breath of fresh air after some lean years. Eraritjaritjaka, Semele Walk, the Ensemble Offspring … there was barely a penguin suit in sight, yet there was music, ''serious music'', everywhere. The performances were consistently good and, best of all, whether it was dance, theatre or film, the music was live. Adventurous, broad-ranging, inclusive. All in all, a big thumbs up. Harriet Cunningham

Lieven Bertels has restored an edge to the festival and diluted the populism that is properly the domain of commercial promoters. He gave us such riveting theatre as The Rape of Lucrece and Eraritjaritjaka, while also bringing us as imaginative a music project as Orchestre National de Jazz's Around Robert Wyatt and multiple doses of the sublime Rokia Traore. Sing The Truth fell short, but, forgivably, it did look good on paper. The best Sydney Festival for half a dozen years. John Shand

Pop

I really missed the huge festival first night and the Hyde Park Barracks bar with its easy, accessible program of fresh, often upcoming music acts. The Spiegeltents in Hyde Park and Parramatta stepped in to fill many of these gaps with inexpensive, fresh-faced sets by Lianne La Havas and Peanut Butter Wolf, but the overall program traded a youthful undercurrent for higher-end art. To me, this reversed the work done by previous directors to bring the festival down to the street level.

Rachel Olding

Pushing out a little more towards the less obvious and the less known made for a more varied and more interesting contemporary music program this year. While the opening night's soul show by Sharon Jones and, to a lesser extent, the soul and funk of Kashmere Stage Band and Japan's Osaka Monaurail, hit enjoyable and easy marks, it was the amplified cellos of Sandglasses, the dancing brass of David Byrne & St Vincent and the kora of Rokia Traore which were the spikes of adventure. Bernard Zuel

Dance

The dance and physical theatre works I reviewed appeared to have been selected by someone more accustomed to straight theatre than dance. Events in which movement is the prime ''language'' demand far more creativity and sophistication in the choreographed action than Sacre, Symphony or Rian delivered. Conversely, Urban, the circus from Colombia, offered only basic acts yet its skill, humour and raw theatricality made it very entertaining. Jill Sykes

Visual art

A survey of a great British artist, the contents of a Chinese home, and the rubber duck that ate Darling Harbour: such was the visual arts component of this year's Sydney Festival. Although visual art is always a sideline to the performing arts program, the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW has won critical and popular acclaim, while Florentijn Hofman's duck was a hit with the public. Song Dong's Waste Not, Want Not at Carriageworks told us a lot about the past 50 years of Chinese history, through all the things his family never managed to throw away. It was a good selection, but please sir, I want some more. John McDonald